SteveYegge makes me wan to learn Rhino, based on his recent essays e.g. Code’s Worst Enemy. So, what’s the best book or online resource to get some in-depths Javascript stuff into my head? Tradition demands that I just buy the next O’Reilly book on the subject. But they, too, have several books. Gah.
I guess I don’t need a reference book because I am comfortable with using specifications and other reference material online.
#Books #Programming #Javascript
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Hmmmph. Call me a cynic, but I never trust a programming language that’s within spitting distance of the “J” word. Think I’ll stick to Ruby (on Rails, or not) if it’s publicly visible stuff, Perl for my own needs and Python if I’m paid lots of cash (and for me to work in python, it needs to be bucketloads 😄 ).
If you want to learn a new, agile language, ruby/rails really is mindblowing. It’s perlish but plain english enough for even a non-programmer to follow, has a very low memory footprint and (most importantly) Just Works. If I remember correctly, you do have ruby books on your bookshelf too 😄
Mind you, I am moving toward mono quite a lot. I like mono. And I love lua, but there’s sadly little demand outside of games development. I like perl & ruby more than anything else though.
– GreyWulf 2008-01-10 20:32 UTC
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I just feel SteveYegge’s pain when he says “Perl 6 really is a pretty nice language design, for the record – I was really infatuated with it back in 2001. The love affair died about five years ago, though.” ¹ Perl 6 is taking longer than Emacs to be released!
The canonical document is the Emacs Timeline by JamieZawinski:
||*Major Version*||*First Release*|| ||:--:||:--:|| ||18||1986|| ||19||1993|| ||20||1997|| ||21||2001|| ||22||2003||
And I thought Emacs was glacial.
Anyway. I’m feeling bad because my company is bananas about Java, SOA, Eclipse and every other technology that is badmouthed by hackers everywhere. Now what do I do?
I felt that maybe server-side Javascript would be an interesting alternative. At least remotely useful at work. Unlike my long-standing interest in learning Common Lisp and Haskell.
I do have the Ruby books. The problem is that Ruby on Rails looked like the perfect tool for boring projects. I didn’t know what to do with Ruby on Rails that I could either not do in Perl or that did not look like corporate blah. So I stopped after a few pages. Shame on me. Maybe I should pick it up again. It just seems that the new thing should be different enough from Perl and Python to be worth it. And Ruby looks like a compromise between Perl and Python. 😄
Mono, however. Now there’s an idea.
– Alex Schroeder 2008-01-10 21:21 UTC
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Ruby is great at solving problems; in that respect, you’re right, it *is* boring. It’s possible to learn it in half a day and be creating full blown web apps a day later. That does create a feeling of “I’m done. Now what?”....
Mind you, that does leave the door open to concentrate on the problems themselves. It’s like having your own private Ning playground. I reckon Ruby is what Perl 6 *should* be, now.
I’m wih you. Mono is very cool. Unlike java, it’s a genuinely useful, productive language that hasn’t been crippled by marketing types and a bad memory model.
– GreyWulf 2008-01-11 01:50 UTC
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Another SteveYegge rant... or rather, a transcript of a talk: Dynamic Languages Strike Back containing lots of hope for Javascript.
– Alex Schroeder 2008-05-27 16:17 UTC